From the moment it was announced the next entry in The Elder Scrolls series would be an MMO, the prospect of the game demanding a subscription fee has been an intensely debated topic. Huge swathes of people proclaimed ESO was dead in the water if it launched requiring a monthly fee, while a smaller subset quietly countered that such a move was needed for the title to succeed. When it eventually was confirmed that, yes, the game would require a monthly subscription, the debate seemed to intensify rather than lessen, and has continued to do so ever since launch in the face of console delays and a mixed reaction to endgame design.
The truth is, I don’t know if ESO will ditch its sub fee. No-one does. Steering toward the issue in a recent interview with creative director Paul Sage I was told “no comment”, so unfortunately I’ve no more official insight than you guys. But as Star Wars: The Old Republic’s first crack at its free-to-play conversion shows us, such a change is far from straightforward. To that end I spoke to Trion Worlds CEO Scott Hartsman and Gameforge CEO Carsten Van Husen - two gentlemen with a wealth of experience in both MMOs and F2P conversions - to find out whether ditching the sub fee really is the right path for an MMO to take, or if it’s a fallacy that such a move can change the game’s fortunes.
The question at the core of the debate that needs addressing is why a developer or publisher would want to move from the predictability offered by a recurring subscription to the uncertainty of a free-to-play model. Consumers merrily argue for such changes, but what’s in it for the manufacturers? According to Hartsman, it’s an issue of accessibility. In the days when MMOs were young and online gaming was very much a niche habit, subscription fees acted as a mutually beneficial contract between gamer and developer. These days, however, with so much choice out there it’s more important than ever to offer the flexibility that enables communities to form.
“Back when online games were young, people would go online and make online game friends in their games,” he explains. “When you’re in a subscription game, the barrier was you had to get one person to subscribe to the game and then they’d play, make friends and stick around. What we’re seeing these days is as more people are coming online and more people are playing, people travel in packs. They want to play games with their friends. When they travel in packs like this, you need the lowest barriers possible in order to get the biggest success.”
In essence, the removal of subscription fees allows you to maximise the number of evangelists you have for your title. Hartsman, who oversaw Trion Worlds take first Rift and more recently Defiance over to the free-to-play model, confirms what many people have long argued: making these changes in an intelligent way can indeed lead to massive jumps in revenue. The example often held aloft by those arguing for transition is The Lord of the Rings Online, which Turbine reported had its revenue triple following the decision to remove the subscription fee. It wasn’t a fluke, by the sounds of things, with Harsten echoing that not only did Rift’s revenue stream more than triple, but it’s sustaining at a higher level too.
Of course, there are drawbacks to this. Subscription fees enable developers to forecast how many players they have for the foreseeable future and what their income is likely to be, which in turn enables the studio to create content patches safe in the knowledge that there will be people around to play them. But while changing to F2P means planning for the future does become harder, it also opens the door to a much faster-paced breed of feedback that, if analysed and reacted to appropriately, enables developers to get the most bang for their buck.
“When you have a steady subscription base, and some people subscribe for a year, some for three months and so on, you definitely get a level of predictability that changes drastically when you go F2P,” Harsten admits. “In a subscription game you’re making money generally whether or not people are actively online at the moment. With free-to-play? Not so much. They have to be online. It’s more of a trade-off than anything else because with a subscription game, while you have better long-term visibility, you lose a ton of instant feedback.”
This feedback is absolutely invaluable during an age that now more than ever sets significant store on instant gratification. That’s not to say it always outweighs the risks that come with F2P games, however. Carsten Van Husen, CEO of Gameforge, the publisher responsible for handling TERA and Aion in Europe, confirms the vast majority of profit in free-to-play titles comes from an inordinately small number of people. The level of unpredictability that this causes, and the risk of losing such individuals, seriously hamstrings MMO developers when it comes to taking risks on new, varied content.
“It’s only a small fraction of those people that ever spend money and of course it’s an even smaller fraction that make you the necessary revenue, but it’s the existence of these people that makes the business model work,” he reveals. “If you are going to tune your title in such a way that there’s a low ceiling per-month in terms of sensible possibility to spend, it wouldn’t work. It’s those high-rollers, sometimes not nicely called ‘whales’, which really should have opportunities to spend substantial amounts of money in order to make the entire thing go.”
The argument for many years, and one I myself have subscribed to, is that if a sub fee can be justified I will gladly pay it, safe in the knowledge it gives the developer the ability to plan ahead and produce more content. When I spoke to Carbine Studios boss Jeremy Gaffney he clearly explained to me why no MMOs ever undercut World of Warcraft in terms of subscription charges, saying to do so would instantly mean operating at a loss. Van Husen disputes this, however, citing titles like Guild Wars 2 as a classic example of succeeding without a subscription but with some of the most regular and reliable content updates of any MMO on the market.
“Of course there can be lower sub fees as zero sub fees exist!” he argues. “Guild Wars for example, you create and continue selling additional campaigns. That’s a way of making money to run the servers. But out of them all I prefer the microtransaction model, where every player can continue to play as long as he wants without subscribing but is free to invest his resources. Free to play games work by letting you achieve the same thing spending more time or spending money. That’s why students and the employed can play together for a trade-off. You can go for low sub fees and run a game successfully.”
For all its problems, however, one thing subscription fees do foster is a sense of loyalty and investment in your title of choice. In an increasingly saturated marketplace, removing this does, indeed, get rid of your barrier to entry but it also merrily opens the gate for the horse to bolt at any time. It’s good for the consumer, as it encourages the creation of content that’ll make you want to stick around, but it’s tricky to see an incredibly powerful publisher like Bethesda opting to open itself up to unnecessary risk.
“We end up seeing a lot of surfers, who move between multiple games,” Hartsman says. “Yes, they tend to only play one at a time, but they’ll play one at a time in two-week or 45-day spurts. We watch them go and come back. Back in the day MMO players were viewed as a separate subset of gamers and behaviour was only affected by other MMOs. These days, everyone is an online gamer in some way. We see more impact from traditional single-player games too.”
There’s no solid conclusion about whether a free-to-play conversion is the solution to The Elder Scrolls Online’s woes. Certainly, the previously-mentioned plans to revamp the poorly-received endgame could prove the shot in the arm it needs but, even if it doesn’t, there’s no conclusive evidence ditching the sub fee is the answer. While publishers have unequivocally seen success with the model, just as many have fallen foul of the intrinsic hypocrisy of gamers, where we both want something for nothing and yet view free-to-play titles as being of a substandard quality, designed with the sole intent of robbing us blind.
The smartest thing Bethesda can do at this stage is, in my opinion, try to fix the problems people have with the MMO’s structure to give the sub model the best chance of survival, before taking the big risk of attempting a transition. While Guild Wars 2 and ArcheAge prove great MMOs can exist without needing monthly payments, the continuing popularity of Final Fantasy XIV, World of Warcraft and WildStar suggest if there’s good stuff worth paying for, there’s a huge audience for it. In the case of ESO then, it seems the main problem isn’t down to the business model at all: as we saw with SWTOR, if you can’t make one of the biggest licenses in the world into a profitable title, maybe the issue isn’t how you’re pitching your product to consumers, but rather the quality of the content itself. In the words of Hartsman, “The sub model will definitely stick around. Free-to-play is an alternative, free-to-play is not a global replacement”.That may be true, but for The Elder Scrolls Online it really seems as if there are bigger fish to fry.
Luke Karmali is IGN's UK News Editor. You too can revel in mediocrity by following him on Twitter.